Although the time has come for Nvidia Ada Lovelace with the GeForce RTX 4090 (test) and RTX 4080 (test), the RTX 3000 generation still does things from time to time some. After Zotac, Colorful now also equips the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti (test) with a GA102 graphics chip that is only half activated.
Colorful follows Zotac with three new editions
The RTX 3070 Ti, submitted by Nvidia in June 2021 in the midst of the mining boom, is the big sister of the GeForce RTX 3070 (test), which is just around 5 percent faster. Both graphics cards are actually united by the built-in graphics chip in the form of the GA104, with the classic RTX 3070 only 5,888 shader units being active and the Ti variant having the fully activated GA104 GPU with 6,144 FP32 ALUs. After the Zotac GeForce RTX 3070Ti-8G6X Apocalypse GOC, three gaming graphics cards from the Chinese manufacturer Colorful now offer exactly the same number of execution units, but a different graphics chip, which VideoCardz first noticed.
Colorful GeForce RTX 3070 Ti iGame Advanced OC V2 (Image: VideoCardz)
Colorful GeForce RTX 3070 Ti iGame Ultra White OC V2 (Image: VideoCardz)Specifically, it is the Colorful GeForce RTX 3070 Ti iGame Vulcan OC, the Colorful GeForce RTX 3070 Ti iGame Advanced OC and the Colorful GeForce RTX 3070 Ti iGame Ultra White OC, whereby the manufacturer always names the GA102 variants with the suffix “V2”. to refer to the modified graphics chip. However, the change does not necessarily promise more performance: As with Zotac a month ago, the new editions also come with only 6,144 active shader units. The full configuration of the GA102, which is used in the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti (test), offers a total of 10,752 CUDA cores – in the case of the new RTX 3070 Ti models, only around 57 percent of the execution units are active.
Colorful GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Vulcan OC with GA 102 and GA104 (Image: VideoCardz)Otherwise almost everything stays the same: There are no differences in the clock rates, the memory interface or the memory expansion. The power supply was only drilled out in parts, which is associated with additional power connections and higher TDP values. With the iGame Ultra White, the cooling performance is also increased with additional heat pipes. In any case, there should be many changes on the PCB that are not visible from the outside to accommodate the much larger GA102.
Recycling partially defective GPUs is not uncommon
The fact that one and the same graphics chip is installed on graphics cards of different performance classes is not necessarily special: on the one hand, partially defective chips can be used in partially deactivated form in this way. On the other hand, it is often simply cheaper for developers and manufacturers to design and produce a smaller number of different chips. The GA102, for example, has so far been used in the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti, RTX 3090, RTX 3080 Ti and the RTX 3080 with 10 and 12 GB graphics memory.
Such a large waste as now with the RTX 3070 Ti is quite unusual; that doesn't seem economical. It is at most conceivable that the yield of fully functional GA104 chips is not necessarily high or that many GA102 copies are struggling with defective execution units or are left over in Nvidia's stocks. But that is mere speculation. In this context, there is also the question of why the GA103, which is actually placed in between, is passed over when the GA104 is switched to the largest gaming ampere chip, the GA102. The model is used, for example, in the RTX 3080 Ti laptop GPU (test) or occasionally in the RTX 3060 Ti.
Release in this country unlikely
The three new Colorful graphics cards are for European customers meanwhile only interesting from a technical perspective: Like Zotac's GeForce RTX 3070 Ti with GA102 before, the models will in all probability only be sold on the Chinese market. The situation is different with the two most recently modified gaming graphics cards of the Ampere generation, the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti with 8 GDDR6X graphics memory and the GeForce RTX 3060 with 8 GB instead of 12 GB graphics memory.
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